Unalaska went dark during a brief power outage Wednesday morning. Powerhouse supervisor Jim Fitch says it was accidentally caused by work on the new engine at the powerhouse. 

He says the contractor that’s installing the engine was running a test on some new equipment. That inadvertantly triggered an automatic shutdown of one of the powerhouse's other engines.

The shutdown caused the power to go out around 8:15 a.m. The outage affected the Unalaska side of town, from the valley to Captains Bay. 

Fitch says workers got the offline engine back up and running, and the lights were back on in about 20 minutes.

It’s the second outage in two weeks in the valley area. The last one was also caused by an auto-shutdown, after an aging cooling pipe on one of the powerhouse engines broke. Fitch says the two incidents aren’t related.